A God who cannot be doubted is not worth believing in.

God of all Wisdom--

We come together because we need you,

Because we need each other,

And because we need to hear your Word.

And if we hear it here,

May we be so possessed by it

That we become servants of it out in your world.

In the name of the Christ who was, and is, and is to come.

Amen.

“Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe."  This is what the risen Christ says to Thomas, the Great Skeptic, or “Doubting Thomas,” who had said "Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe." Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe. This story seems to put seeing and believing on one side, and believing without seeing on the other. The simple algebra of this story makes it easy to conclude that if you doubt, if you have to see to believe, then perhaps you have a second-rate faith, or at least that you have foregone the blessing which is conferred on those who believe without seeing. It is so tempting to reduce this lesson to a binary proposition: either you doubt or you really believe. If I may put it plainly, this old layman thinks that’s nonsense.

Fifty years ago, I was a greasy-haired teenager in a long tweed coat, sitting in a pew separately from the rest of my family, because they were so annoying; I’m sure the feeling was mutual. The preacher that day was a professor at the Episcopal Divinity School, which was down the street; his name was John Snow, and he said “a God who cannot be doubted is not a God worth believing in.” A God who cannot be doubted is not worth believing in. Before I heard that, like most teenagers, I was lost. When I heard that, I was found. I cannot understate the light of affirmation that shone upon me that Sunday morning. I believed that God was real, but until then I doubted that God was present in my turmoil. I continued to be an obnoxious teenager, of course, and to question just about everything, but in the journey from that day to this one, the truth that we can doubt like Thomas-- that we can legitimately yearn for supporting evidence in our bumpy efforts to live the words we say—that truth has been a Godsend. Literally. Doubting like Thomas, in the real world, opens the mind and the Spirit to the very real streams of Grace that flow through the Kingdom, the Kingdom which is within us. This is an important point, and the the exchange from Luke’s gospel bears repeating here:  “And when he (Jesus) was questioned by the Pharisees as to when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, “The kingdom of God comes not with things that can be observed. They shall not say, Look here! or, See there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.”

I think Christ’s message to Thomas was not a jibe, not a jab at those of us who, ayt times, are not quite sure, and who plow ahead trying to fake it until we make it. Of course I suspect that this is most of us most of the time but I don’t pretend to know what’s in other people’s hearts; it could be that everyone else really is a better believer than I am. What I hear Christ saying to Thomas is not that wanting to see for yourself is a lesser path, but rather that the way Thomas was seeing cannot be the foundation for the Kingdom, in fairly practical terms. Thomas wanted to see and touch the scars. Jesus at that moment was deploying the apostles to bring the Way of Love to the world, and to bring the world to the Way of Love. So if an anatomical show-and-tell was needed to open the eyes of one of the Twelve, what would that mean for the work of those sent out to proclaim the Way of Christ abroad in the land? Could every seeker require this sort of baptism by blood-and-guts? Of course not. Christ’s intent, I believe, was to support his team, and His message, message—His purpose in calling BS on his brother Thomas—was to remind us all that the seeing, that the gathering of evidence we need, is there if only we open our eyes a little wider, and that the proof will come from within, because if we see for real, we can see the love of God in any newborn child, in any hand offered in fellowship, and in any sunrise that greets us with a chance to love and be loved for another day. And when we are not quite sure, when we doubt, the door is thereby opened for the light and the warmth and the ‘sight’ of evidence that we yearn for. Thomas got it from the risen Christ, I got it from Rev. Snow, and I have no doubt that every one of us has seen the unseen in many moments of our actual lived lives. We can hardly help it, because the Kingdom is within us, each of us, and when we ‘see’ it we are bound to say, with Thomas, “My Lord and my God!”

None of what I say here is unique to my own experience and my own perceptions. The writer Anne Lamott, who is as plain and funny an apologist for everyday faith as I have ever read, wrote that “the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty.” Further consultation with Dr. Google reveals that many prominent theologians and preachers have advanced versions of this axiom, enough to qualify it as a common theme in present-day Christianity. My version might go something like this: if Faith is Trust, then Faith is not Control. If we are certain, we imagine we are in control. If we are uncertain, then we have to trust. Because we are human, trust invites doubt, and if we doubt, we are granting ourselves a chance to believe. This morning’s gospel does more than hint at this, insofar as it renders belief not as a thing that is or isn’t, but as a dynamic process. I am reliably informed that the Greek in John’s Gospel never uses a noun form for words translated as “faith” or “belief,” but always uses a verb form, and this is in our English translation as well: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come tobelieve."

What a relief, to know that faith happens, and that it does not happen all at once. We come to believe, whether we touch the scars or are confronted by the force of love. And we bring faith to the world when we practice resurrection, when we love each other as we have been loved. Thomas needed to learn this, and so do we, that God can be doubted, precisely because God can be believed in.

Amen.